The Camels Are Coming (Biggles #1)

No book club edition is at issue; the trap is the fourth "edition" onward, reissued in John Hamilton's cheaper ACE Series — page count drops from 259 to 220 and a colour frontispiece by Howard Leigh is added, absent from the first three. Later "first thus" reprints split and bowdlerised the stories into Biggles of the Special Air Police (1953, six stories) and Biggles Pioneer Air Fighter (1954, eleven stories), with references to alcohol and profanity removed to suit children; these do not carry the original text. The 1936 German issue, Feindliche Flieger in Sicht, is a translation, not a first.